the world is not indifferent to our music
I'm in the introduction of Out of Chaos Man's New Dialogue with Nature of Prigogine and Stengers, and there is a quote in the introduction by Pascal (1904)1 that reads
Man must at last finally awake from his millenary dream; and in doing so, awake to his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. Now does he at last realise that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world. A world that is deaf to his music, just as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his suffering or his crimes.
This is a feeling I fell into in my later teens and all the way into my twenties, as I extracted myself forcefully from a world of rigid Catholicism with the act of both self-exile and "learning". This feeling that since the world is matter, then it is uncaring and uninterested in our activities and endeavours. I do not mean the world as in "the people around us", I mean literally the world of what we could colloquially define as inert (soil, stone, plants, etc). I thought that it is a cold and cruel world where its fundamental objectivity is liberating.
But honestly, I think it was a terrible point of view to take. That is not to say that I am now someone that believes crystals are able to channel my manifestations into a deeper realm of reality, to make the cogs of fate turn into my direction (trip to Japan), but that you can be both "objective" and a "materialist" without deluding yourself that you are in a world that is grey and automated.
The quote above, from the early 1900s reeks of Humanism, this idea that there is a Human nature, and hence that Humanity can be defined as something distinct and bound. This bind creates a border, and suddenly we have to justify how Humanity interacts with the world around it. Is there a boundary really? Are we not in and of the world?
The mistake I made back then is the same I see many people who wish to be a "realist" make.
Rather, the world in its pure raw materiality is a world of expression itself. We ourselves have spun out from the world (in both Atheism and Christianity, we have spun out of the Earth itself, wether it is soil laced with stardust or clay). Material is immensely expressive to the point that it creates a being (us) that looks around and thinks: What's all this boring dust doing laying here slacking off?2
So in this sense I follow what I think Deleuze and Guattari try to tell us in many different ways. That the world is not indifferent to our music and our lives, but that we require a realignment of the illusory hierarchy of what constitutes "giving a fuck".
A room resonates when we sing, auditoriums are designed to negotiate with matter on the best way to transfer sound across a venue, we mold clay for our use and certain mixtures allow different structures to emerge, we negotiate with metal to create megastructures, and explore the possibilities of conglomerates of stone, cement, and sand that help us create durable concrete. Science shows us consistently that matter is not indifferent, but for some odd reason we've already decided that either God is giving life to all things, or that since there is no God, the way for liberation is that there is no life in things and that equates freedom from God.
Over time I realised there might be another way, and no, it's not to buy crystals from Aliexpress thinking they'll help you to manifest your daddy issues away, although if that makes you feel better... I guess go for it?